Subject: APO 3.5m users committee minutes, 11/9/09
From: Suzanne Hawley
Submitted: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:46:23 -0800 (PST)
Message number: 1154
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APO 3.5-m Users Committee Phonecon, 11/9/09
Attending: Suzanne Hawley, Mark Klaene, Al Harper, Bill Ketzeback, John Bally, Jon Fulbright, Jon Holtzman, Remy Indebetouw, Scott Anderson, Bruce Gillespie
Absent: Michael Strauss
**********************************
User feedback, comments from institutional representatives:
Chicago (Al Harper) - Al said he had nothing new to report.
New Mexico State (Jon Holtzman) - Jon said thanks to the APO staff for supporting a recent site trip by students.
Washington (Scott Anderson) - Scott asked about the status of 2-d extractions
for data reductions for TripleSpec data. Jon Holtzman said that there is a
description of an IDL tool in the user documentation, but upon discussion,
it was decided this is about the 1-d reductions. John Bally said that
there is an IRAF 2-d package that has been used with APO data, and people
should contact Adam Ginsberg at CU for more information.
Colorado (John Bally) - John said he had nothing new to report.
Princeton - There was e-mail from Michael that indicated that there
was nothing to report from PU.
Johns Hopkins (Jon Fulbright) - Jon said he had nothing new to report.
Virginia (Remy Indebetouw) - Remy said that he has questions about scheduling
and handling targets of opportunity. He will discuss this off-line with
Suzanne and Russet McMillan first.
**********************************
Discussion of telescope/instruments report - Klaene:
Mark called attention to the impending housing crunch at Sunspot, which
has long served as a source for overflow housing for Apache Point.
NSO/Sunspot will be seeing an influx of new staff and visitors associated
with the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope project, and beginning next
year there will be little, if any, spare housing at their facility that
we can use. As we occasionally use the Sunspot housing for our visiting
student and other larger groups, we are investigating how much of a problem
this might be for us beginning in 2010. Institutions that are planning
student visits or other large groups (more than 2-3 people) next year
should contact the observatory as far ahead of time as possible, and
on-site observing visits should be arranged as soon as the schedule is
known. It is also a good idea to let Suzanne and Russet know about
on-site visits in the telescope scheduling requests. Good communication
between users, institutional schedulers and the observatory will be essential
to make sure we can accomodate groups as much as possible.
Additionally, Mark pointed to the fact that the new direct drives and
servos are now working very reliably, and we continue to fine-tune the
parameters. Not much on-sky engineering time has been available to
optimize the performance, so users should provide feedback to the
observatory if they experience drive anomalies.
*************************
3.5-m Telescope, Instruments, and CIF Projects Highlights, 10/2/09 through 11/3/09
Mark Klaene
0) Overview
We saw our first snowfall of the season, and unfortunately for observing
we have seen weather service predictions for a wetter-than- normal winter
this year. As in recent years, we will continue to aggressively remove
snow from the roof as long as personnel safety requirements can be met.
The Operations Building kitchen remodeling was completed. Discussion with
NSO/SP indicate that future visitor housing will be extremely limited at
Sunspot in the coming years due to an influx of ATST personnel coming to
NSO/SP. Combined with planned SDSS-III commissioning of new instrumentation
next year, this may create a severe housing crunch for visitors in 2010
and early 2011. While we should be able to handle the occasional 2-3
visitors in our own housing, large on-site groups may be a problem.
Please check with the observatory before planning any student trips (or
for any large group) to APO.
1) Telescope
The first half of the month saw a number of issues with the new controller
servo loop dropping out. After a lot of effort, a software bug was
discovered and corrected, and motion errors that were happening 3-5 times
a night immediately stopped. We continue to characterize the performance,
and adjust tuning parameters and software, to optimize performance.
Additionally, work continues to make the new drive hardware more robust.
2) Instruments
DIS, Echelle, SPIcam, Agile and TripleSpec ran with no problems. We
had the NMSU NAIC instrument on site for a few visiting runs. GFP was
used successfully for one run, with no further vacuum problems.
The DIS slitviewer camera is showing some occasional banding and we are
starting discussions with the manufacturer regarding possible causes and
fixes. At this stage, it is not hindering slit-view guiding.
The new NICFPS fanout board is progressing slowly with the board at CU for
final assembly and testing. UVa testing of the design looked promising.
There was no progress on the NIC-FPS etalon.
3) CIF projects
The CIF projects for 2010 have been identified. The plan is to make
significant progress on: the calibration lamps (improved UV/blue flux
intensity), high-altitude M1 positioning, installation of encoder tape
on one motion axis, purchase and fabrication of direct-drive spares,
and installation of a brake on altitude axis.
**********************************
Instrument studies - Hawley:
Suzanne referred to three documents that were sent earlier to the Users
Committee: a white paper by Eric Burgh on upgrading the echelle,
another by Cynthia Froning et al. on building a new visible-light imager
for APO, and the third being an agenda for a December preliminary design
review for the FIRST instrument.
The echelle upgrade proposal suggests a new detector, AR coatings on the
uncoated optics, a new grating, and an image slicer. The estimated total
capital costs for these upgrades are ~$200k, but with labor (in-kind or
contracted) added, the grand total will of course be more. The improvements
would bring an improvement in resolution to about 50,000, and increase
sensitivity possibly by a factor of 2. It was pointed out that the
recent ReSTAR study of mid-sized telescopes indicated that an instrument
with these capabilities would be a unique facility in the U.S., and could
find great appeal to both ARC and non-consortium users. Suzanne said
that the Burgh proposal is very specific and concrete, and the costs of
supporting the upgrade could come at least partially from capital improvement
funds. One major question is who would lead the project.
Jon Holtzman, a co-author on the imager upgrade white paper, said that
their white paper was more open-ended than the one for the echelle
because there is a large parameter space to consider that needs to be
driven by more specificity in the science requirements. Nonetheless,
five possible options are given:
o a new f/2 camera, well-sampled and wide-field, but expensive optics
o a new f/5 camera, well-sampled and medium-field, simpler optics
o borrowing the QUOTA camera from WIYN; electronic tip-tilt may improve
PSF 10-20%, no improvement in FOV, need new filters, complicated
operations and maintenance
o a simple camera permanently mounted on the TR1 port, but which would not
provide much improvement in capability over SPIcam
o a multi-band, cascade-dichroic camera concept, which would be
somewhat unique on telescopes in our class but would be expensive and
complicated; could be attractive for outside funding, however.
After some discussion of the options, there seemed to some favor given
to any option that has re-imaging optics, allowing a pupil stop to be
placed in the instrument to control stray light. Being able to use the
extensive set of existing filters is also deemed important. We need to
revisit this topic, and user feedback is welcome.
===> ACTION: Users committee members to carefully read the echelle and
imager white papers, discuss them with potential users, and be prepared
for further discussion at the December Users Committee meeting.
**********************************
Possible FIRST instrument PDR - Hawley:
On a related topic, Suzanne said that a preliminary design review
for Jian Ge's FIRST instrument, which has been under discussion for some
time as a new instrument for the 3.5-m telescope, is being discussed. FIRST
would be a high-resolution NIR dispersed interferometer, possibly employing
a laser comb that is under construction at CU. It could be used for
high-precision RV work such as extra-solar planet research. John Bally
said he would try to attend the PDR if it is scheduled. If any other
committee members are interested in attending, contact Suzanne. We will
discuss this further at the next Users Committee meeting:
===> ACTION: Users committee members to get feedback from potential FIRST users for December Users Committee meeting.
**********************************
Annual report and board meeting - Hawley:
The annual Board of Governors meeting is next Monday; Suzanne and Mark
are going to present the 3.5-m and site reports for 2009. The institutional
board members have copies of these reports. The budget will be
essentially flat next year, and we expect to devote some CIF money
to instrumentation projects. Suzanne noted that the Users Committee
is poised to play a major role in steering the future instrumentation
development work for the telescope.
**********************************
ACTION ITEMS:
[open from previous months]:
===> ACTION: Russet McMillan will look at the TripleSpec user documentation for its adequacy in describing darks and sky calibrations for the long-slit mode.
STATUS: Open, and added that we need to talk to Adam Ginsberg about 2-d extraction data reductions.
[new actions from this meeting]:
===> ACTION: Users committee members to carefully read the echelle and imager upgrade proposals, discuss them with potential users, and be prepared for further discussion at the December Users Committee meeting.
===> ACTION: Users committee members to get feedback from potential FIRST users for December Users Committee meeting.
**********************************
Next meeting: The next Users Committee phonecon will be on Monday, 7 December, at 8:30 AM Pacific Time. The agenda and other materials will be sent to the committee members during the preceding week.
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